


When You're Found

by MaggieMaybe160



Series: Six Pieces to a Boone [1]
Category: Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Anxiety, Dead Money DLC, Drug Addiction, F/M, Falling In Love, Feelings Realization, First Kiss, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Heavy Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Implied Sexual Content, Injury, Love Confessions, Misunderstandings, Possibly Unrequited Love, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Trauma, Recovery, Sierra Madre (Fallout), Sleep Deprivation, Trauma, Watching Someone Sleep, Worry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-29
Updated: 2020-08-06
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:47:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 18,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25590805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaggieMaybe160/pseuds/MaggieMaybe160
Summary: Boone is left alone in the desert to search for his lost Courier. When she comes back from the Sierra Madre, Boone is left with the pieces of her to put back together.
Relationships: Craig Boone/Female Courier
Series: Six Pieces to a Boone [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1911934
Comments: 51
Kudos: 61





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [insominia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/insominia/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Even When I Sleep](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10317479) by [insominia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/insominia/pseuds/insominia). 



Boone blinks blearily as he sits up. The last thing he remembers is being in that vault with Courier Six. They’d been following that radio transmission when the vault filled with gas. He’d barely had a chance to notice it was gas before he was on the floor. The first thing Boone realizes is that he’s not in the vault anymore, but out in the sand of the Mojave Desert. 

“One hell of a knock-out gas, huh, Six?” Boone asks, his throat dry. He stretches his neck before looking around. “Six?” She’s nowhere near him. She’s nowhere at all from the looks of it. A bottle hits his foot and he grabs it. Purified water. “Six?” 

Everything she had on her is scattered around him. Every bottle of water, every stimpack, every gun. He can feel his heart pounding in his chest and all he can hear is the heavy thrum of panic. The last time he had felt this way, he’d just arrived home to find Carla gone. 

“Six!” Her name rips from his throat in a loud scream that he can’t remember ever using before. It sounds strange and heartbroken, forlorn, but he ignores that and screams again. “Six!” 

He had been right there. He’d been right next to her and he still couldn’t protect her. If the Legion has her, he doesn’t know what he’d do. He can’t go through that again. He’ll kill every last one of those Legion scum. If Six is there, he’ll get her back if it kills him.

As Boone starts running toward their old camp, he remembers when he and Six had taken them out. Their camp is abandoned now. They’ve been pushed out and killed. That fight is over. He stops running and looks around him. Her things are still everywhere. Food is drawing the attention of critters that he wants nothing to do with and if she’s out here, he needs to keep them away for her. 

Boone looks down his scope and squeezes the trigger without much thought. The things aren’t exactly hard kills. They go down easy and Boone goes to start collecting Six’s things, drinking one of the containers of purified water and making a mental note that he owes her one. Not that they haven’t gotten to the point of sharing everything they have, but it became a game for them. 

It started when she needed a stimpack and once Boone had taken out the fucker who had been shooting, he’d knelt beside her and helped her. 

“I owe you a stimpack,” she’d smiled despite nearly dying. 

“I’ll put it on your tab,” he’d said as he helped her back up. 

It had continued when she shared some squirrel meat for dinner. “I owe you,” Boone had said, raising the stick. 

“I’ll put it on your tab.” 

So far, her tab included a stimpack or three, ten bottlecaps, some scrap metal, and a jug of dirty water. His tab was mostly food, also ten bottlecaps (which he had argued should clear both their debts), a bullet, his own sunglasses (which he thought was ridiculous but it made her laugh so it was worth it), and now a bottle of purified water. 

“Fuck,” Boone says through clenched teeth. He will scour the entire Mojave to find her if that’s what it takes. And he intends to do so. 

Almost every time Boone looks down his scope at a fiend or some asshole, he’s back at that day. The day he’d been looking down the scope at Carla. Only, his flashbacks have changed and he’s aiming his sniper at Six. He watches the mysterious gas consume her and he jerks up away from his gun, panting as his heart races. 

Every time he sleeps, Boone dreams fitfully of her. He can hear her telling him that they should check out the radio signal. He can see her grin when she puts her hands on the bunker door. He can feel himself choking on the gas. He wakes up when he hears her scream. He’s always alone. 

This can’t be happening again. Last time this happened, it had sent him over the edge. He’d tried so many times just to end it. He didn’t want to sleep anymore. The only thing that kept him going back then was that he still hadn’t killed the bitch who had sold his wife to the Legion. The thing that saved him was Six. Six had shown up, helped him, and pulled him out along with her on her insane journey through the desert instead of letting him go back to that hell hole of a room. 

It’s happening again. He’s spiraling and he’s hyper-fixated on finding Six and killing whoever took her. He can’t stop. The only time he rests is to sleep for a few short hours. He screams for Six. 

Manny Fucking Vargas. Boone is dragged back to Novac by Manny. They were friends once, of course, but that’s long since passed. Manny had spotted Boone out in the desert alone and had come to bring him back up to Novac, though he’d called it home. 

“It’s not my fucking home,” Boone says through his teeth. 

“Fine. Alright, man,” Manny says, his hands up. 

They’re in Manny’s room, right next door to Boone’s old room. They probably haven’t bothered cleaning it up and giving it to someone else. The puke and bloodstains are probably still there along with his ways out. He tries not to think about it. 

“What were you even doing out there alone?” Manny asks as they take their seats across the room from each other. “Where’s Six?” 

Where is Six? That is the question. Boone takes a sip from a bottle of scotch. It’s the kind of sip that Six calls chugging. He caps it and shakes his head slowly. “I don’t know.” 

“How long has she been gone?” 

“Three days.” And ten hours, twelve minutes, and approximately forty seconds. Not that Boone has been keeping track. 

“You’ve been out there for three days?” Manny makes it sound like it’s something intense and grueling or surprising at all. It might be, but he can’t find her and he should still be out there looking for her. “You need to let her go, man.”

“No,” is all Boone says through his clenched jaw before he takes another swig. He would rather die than give up on her. It’s the first time that Boone notices that he doesn’t want to die anymore. She made him forget. She made him smile and laugh and breathe. She made him forget about the scars on his wrists and the shadows of his heart. He’s never said it and he might just be finally realizing it, but he loves her. Not loves her in the sense that she’s his best friend and go on every adventure they possibly could together. Well, yes he loves her that way too, but he’s _in love_ with her. His stomach knots and he takes another sip. 

“Who’s on duty tonight?” Boone asks, trying to take his mind away from the realizations that might tear him apart if he gives them any more thought. He still needs to find her. 

“Why, you comin’ back?” Fucking Manny. 

“No.” 

Boone gets up and leaves the room, walking across the empty yard to the giant dinosaur that he always thought had the dumbest name. Who names a dinosaur (or anything really) Dinky? He walks past the counter filled with the plush toys of the dinosaur. There had been one among Six’s things when he had picked up what he could. 

He hadn’t known she’d even had a Dinky toy. He’d never seen her take one, but from the looks of the one he now has in his pack until he finds her, she’s had the thing since they met or close to it. It’s caked with dirt and has some bloodstains here and there. It looks rough, but it’s hers so it has to be here when he finds her. 

Boone sits up in the dinosaur’s mouth and scans the desert for any sign of her. Any minute now he should see her with her patched up leather armor and the beret he’d given her that she refuses to take off. Except… He knows she doesn’t have those things. He’d found his beret on the ground. Her armor was torn and scattered. He can’t think about what that could mean. It’ll eat him alive. 

Boone takes the filthy dumb toy out of his pack and stares at it for a moment. It’s still gross and could do with a bath if toys had baths. One of the eyes is missing and he wonders if she pulled it off or it came loose and got lost in the bottom of her pack. He rubs his thumb over the place where the eye should be. 

His throat is raw from screaming. He can’t remember screaming like that at any point in his life. His voice had sounded foreign to him, but there was nothing to stop it. Locked away in his dinosaur tower, he can finally feel the burn of his overused throat. 

“Tell me about yourself,” she had pushed on multiple occasions, walking ahead of him, often with her feet on railroad steel going heel to toe. 

“If you want. It’s not really my thing,” he had always sighed, resigned. They were a quiet pair, which suited him perfectly, but she would say random things or look over her shoulder sporadically to make sure he was still there. Eventually, he came to like it, nodding to her when she turned, answering her when she called. It became comfortable to become part of her checks. 

“Six,” he sighs, looking out over the empty desert, a dinosaur in his hand, “come back.” 

Six’s room at Novac is plain. She never decorated it or tried to make it a home. She knew Boone didn’t want to stay here and had said she wouldn’t make a home of it either. She didn’t need to do that, but she had. Her room isn’t decorated, but it still manages to tell stories about her and her neglect of the place. The bed is made, but it isn’t bounce-a-bottle-cap perfect, nor is it stripped like most of the beds here. There’s no trace of an owner besides that. This isn’t her home and it never was. 

Boone hasn’t been in this room in a long time, not since she got the ‘38. He’s sleeping here so he doesn’t have to sleep in his old room and start up bad habits. Falling onto her bed doesn’t stir anything in him because it doesn’t feel like hers. It’s less hers than the corner room at the Wrangler. 

Boone sleeps as little as possible so he can spend all of his time in the dinosaur’s mouth looking out and wondering when he’ll spot or get the nerve to leave Novac again and try his hand at combing the desert by foot again. Last time he lasted three days. His desperation growing, he will probably last longer before he’s found a pathetic lump who has been reduced to one word: Six. 

“What are you drinking?” Manny asks, the playful judgment that he’d once used when they were friends in his voice. Boone takes a sip. 

“Did you see anything?” he asks instead of telling Manny that he’s drinking whatever alcohol he’d found in the bottom of his pack. “The day she went missing, did you see anything?” He hates asking Manny this. When he’d asked him about Carla, the asshole had been happy she was gone. Then, Manny always did have a crush on him. 

“You mean did I see your girlfriend get kidnapped?” The bitter tone is there and Boone glares. 

“She’s not my girlfriend.” He sighs through his nose and contemplates leaving. Manny isn’t going to help him. He’s just as resentful as he was back then. “Did you see anything?” he asks again instead. 

“No, man. You think I would keep that from you? Of course, I didn’t see shit. What I saw was you out there killing yourself over a Courier.” Manny shakes his head and looks away from Boone, out over the Mojave that remains as empty as ever. 

Roughly fifteen days, nineteen hours, two minutes, and thirty seconds pass between Boone waking up in the desert alone and the moment he sees Six. His heart jumps and he swallows it down. Boone races down through the dinosaur, almost running into the door and falling down the stairs as he goes. He’s running to her, ready with her dinosaur in his pack and his gun ready to protect her.  
  
Six. 


	2. Chapter 2

Boone’s excitement is short-lived. 

Six is stumbling through the sand, not walking. She takes a few sideways steps before righting herself again and moving forward. She’s wearing a jumpsuit he doesn’t recognize and she stops when she sees him. 

“No. No, that’s not good. No. Wake up,” he hears Six mutter to herself. She digs into a bag and comes up with a syringe before stabbing it into her thigh. “Wake up,” she says again, her voice hushed and frightened. Her eyes widen for a moment and she looks away from Boone and keeps walking. 

“Six?” 

As he gets closer, he sees her hands are covered in blood. He can’t tell if it’s hers or someone else’s, but either way, it’s not good. She continues to ignore him, staggering and whispering incoherently. He follows behind her, eyes darting between her and where he saw her come from. Whoever took her might be out here and they’re going to have hell to pay. 

Even in the dark, Boone can see that Six has a giant X on her back. His grip on his gun tightens, but he stays close, the way she always told him to. 

He would be lying if he said he’d seen someone in this state before. He’d seen people brought to the brink from their own horrors of war and massacre, but this is different somehow. She looks like she hasn’t slept in days if not weeks. She’s shaking just enough to be noticeable, and whispering to herself. She’s beyond scared and he didn’t think he’d ever have to see her like this. 

He was supposed to protect her. She was right next to him and he’d failed. And now, she’s right here and he can’t reach out, afraid of scaring her more. He looks between her and Novac, wondering how he can convince her to go back there when she’s so strung out. 

When he looks back, she’s grabbed a rock and is running at a gecko. Boone raises his sniper and shoots it down in one go, but she keeps running before she falls to her knees beside the corpse. She used to raid their bodies for meat and hides, but she hasn’t done that in a long ass time. And she’s not doing it now. 

She slams the rock down into the head of the dead gecko and keeps bashing. “The heads can breathe,” she tells herself in a hypnotized voice. Boone runs forward as she keeps going, her hands getting bloodier and the head of the thing becoming pulp under her beating fists. 

“It’s dead,” Boone tells her, grabbing her arms. She strains against him, pulling to get free as she starts to hyperventilate. “Six!”

“Gotta take the heads!” she screams. He has never heard her scream. Not when she was scared when they first met, not when she was angry and killing Benny with a straight razor. “Gotta take the heads!” she yells again before headbutting him to free herself. She resumes her savage beating of the beyond dead gecko as Boone holds his now bleeding nose. “Heads can still breathe,” she says through her quick breaths. “Still breathing. Always breathing. Still breathing.” 

She rocks back on her heels after there is nothing left of the head, a bloody mess mixed up with the dirt in front of her. 

“Six, look at me,” Boone says, lowering his hands from his face. Six stops breathing, her entire body going rigid. “Six,” he says again. She turns slowly and drags her eyes up to his face like the image of him hurts her. 

“You’re here when I sleep. I can’t sleep. They’ll kill me. I can’t sleep.” She looks away from him again and starts digging in her pack frantically. “Boone. Not Boone. Never Boone. I can’t sleep. Wake up. Can’t sleep. Wake up. They’ll kill me.” She repeats until she grabs a syringe and plunges it into her thigh again. Boone tries to stop her from pushing down the plunger, but she’s too fast. 

Her eyes widen again for a moment before she blinks and drops the syringe. She’s taking adrenaline shots to stay awake. This isn’t good. 

“We need to get you out of here,” Boone says, looking around for any more creepy crawlies that might become the next victim of her melee. 

“Why are you still here?!” Six shouts, scrambling away from him. “Wake up!” she shrieks, covering her ears against her own noise. She opens her eyes again and dives back into the pack. Another shot? Boone grabs her hands and keeps her from grabbing another shot. “Wake up!” she screams again, struggling against his grip. 

“When was the last time you slept?” Boone demands, kneeling in front of her, his hands tight around her wrists. He’ll beat himself up later over how harsh his tone is, but right now he needs to take care of her. He needs to get her back to Novac and he needs her to sleep. 

“Never sleep!” She shakes her head but it’s more like thrashing. “I can’t sleep! I can’t sleep! I need adrenaline! Adrenaline!” 

She probably hasn’t slept in the fifteen days she’s been gone. Boone winces at the thought and sighs. She pulls against his grip and he lets go before scooping her up and throwing her over his shoulder. She kicks and pounds on his back with her bloody fists, but he just grunts and walks toward Novac. 

“Boone?” Manny asks, opening his door as Boone passes with Six. “What the fuck happened?”

“Don’t ask,” Boone says with a grunt and keeps walking to her room. Six knees him in the chest before kicking toward him, her foot connecting with his stomach. He holds on tighter even though that one hurt. 

When he opens the door to her room, he drops her on the bed and takes a step away from her, her pack in his hands. She lunges at him, her eyes unfocused and somewhat feral looking. He presses his back to the door and digs into his own pocket for med-x to try to get her down to sleep. 

“Fuck,” Boone says, uncapping the syringe with his teeth as she claws at him. It takes five med-x injections before her eyelids droop and he has to catch her as she passes out. 

He takes her back to the bed, grateful for the break in her attacks. He needs to get her out of this jumpsuit. He doesn’t know what the X means, but it’s not good. Her leather armor is still in shreds in the corner of the room where he’d left it. He’d been too focused on finding her to actually repair any of it. He goes to his pack instead and pulls out his spare set of clothes. 

He’s careful as he helps her out of the jumpsuit, searching for marks and bruises or any breaks as he goes. There are injection marks in her thighs and arms, bruises here and there that could be from anything, and a ring of raw skin, scabbed in some places, around her neck. He lets out a breath, worry creasing his brow. 

“What did they do to you?” he breathes. 

With a rag that he pours purified water onto, Boone gently washes the blood from her hands and uses his own nails to scrape out the brains from under her fingernails. She shouldn’t have to wake up with any of that still marking her. 

It’s harder than he expects it’s going to be to get her into his gray shirt and NCR uniform pants. He punches a hole through the belt with a switchblade so the pants will stay around her waist. Once she’s dressed, he drops the jumpsuit into the bathtub in the bathroom and returns to her, sitting on the bed with her next to him. 

He’s used to watching over her while she sleeps. He’d never outgrown the PTSD tendencies and the need for one person to always be on watch. It used to just be somewhat lonely and boring. He’d sit up and eat or drink while she slept on whatever bed she could find. When she was scared, she’d ask him to sit on the edge of the bed. 

Boone can’t stop looking at the marks around her neck. It looks like she was wearing some kind of collar that was too tight or too heavy or both. He has too many questions, but he doubts she’ll be in the answering mood when she wakes. The look in her eyes had been haunted and far away like she wasn’t seeing what was right in front of her. It was the kind of look he’d seen in soldiers after the massacre. The kind of look he’d had for a while too. 

He remembers when he found out that she was the Courier everyone was talking about. Boone had been listening to the radio as they walked away from Novac and he’d heard them reporting about a Courier who had been shot in the head outside of Good Springs and managed to make a miraculous recovery. 

“Could you fucking imagine?” he’d scoffed. Six had looked over her shoulder briefly but had said nothing. 

Then there was the guy at the camp they liberated. When she walked in, his face had drained of all color as he stuttered out that she was the one Benny had wasted. 

_ “Wasted?” _ he’d thought at the time, looking between her and the man with the accusations. When Six had confirmed it and taken the lighter of this Benny asshole, Boone was still reeling. “ _ Wasted means killed. How is she even here right now?” _

“You were shot?” Boone had asked instead after the mission was over and they were on their way somewhere else. 

She’d paused, thinking for a moment before she looked over her shoulder at him and said, “Yeah.” 

“In the head?” he’d pressed because he’d seen her get shot in the arm and leg already. 

“Yeah.” 

“I know we don’t really do the whole talking thing, but what the fuck?” Boone had asked, needing much more than two yeah’s.

“The man in the checkered suit that I told you I was looking for shot me in the head. A robot named Victor dug me out of my grave and I think he’s been stalking me since I left Good Springs but that’s another story. I woke up after I thought my brain had been blown out the back of my head and I was apparently okay. Some doctor had patched me up and sent me off. Then I found Novac."

“What the fuck?” had been the only suitable response at the time. 

Then the conversation was over and Boone got to watch as this fierce woman who’d survived a bullet to the brain killed the fucker who did it. 

He’ll need more than two yeah’s again. She was missing for more than two weeks and came back with more problems than he knows how to solve. He needs to get her to Freeside to see Arcade no matter how much he doesn’t like him. Arcade likes Six and he can help her. But first, she needs to sleep. 

It’s an hour before Boone finally looks away from her face and the marks on her neck. They drift to her pack that’s still by the door from when she was attacking him for her adrenaline shots. He doesn’t know what else is in there, but his stomach is already turning over. 

He only leaves her side to grab the pack before he returns, sitting right next to her. Taking a deep breath, he opens it up and dumps the contents onto the bed between his legs. There are several jars of black liquid, too many more adrenaline shots, some empty syringes, an unfamiliar powder, misty and red, and a dress. There’s no food. No water. No weapons or stimpacks or anything really. He picks up the dress and is surprised by the indecent slit in the skirt. His face burns as he forces himself not to picture her in this dress as he tosses it back into the pack. 

Worry continues to eat at him as he picks up the jars. The black ooze is labeled in multiple people’s hands which gives him hope that Six wasn’t alone, but that hope dies quickly when he wonders who the fuck she was with. They all read “Sierra Madre Martini”. 

It doesn’t look like any martini he’s ever seen. He unscrews one of the jars that has Six’s writing on it and takes a whiff. It burns and the foul smell makes his stomach lurch. He runs to the bathroom and doubles over the toilet, emptying his stomach into the bowl. He wipes his mouth on the back of his hand and goes back to close the jar. After that, he decides not to further his explorations, his curiosity about the red powder is overwhelmed by his disgust and anxiety. The more he finds, the more queasy and guilty he feels. 

Boone repacks her bag before grabbing the adrenaline and emptying all of it into the sink, tossing all of the syringes in the trash. She still hasn’t woken when he returns to her side and he settles beside her, wondering silently what he hadn’t been there for. What had he missed? How could he have let this happen? 

“Where am I?” Six asks as she sits up a few hours later, blinking away the drugged sleep. Her eyes look clearer than they had, but then she focuses on Boone. “Boone?”

“We’re in Novac,” Boone says, moving so she can’t see her pack. Her hand goes to her throat and she looks around wildly. “Hey. Whoa. Look at me.”

Her eyes focus back on him and she stammers out, “How did I get here?”

“You walked most of it,” he says, leaving out that he’d had to drag her out of the desert. 

“I don’t…” She shakes her head a little. “I don’t remember.” 

“Where were you?” Boone asks, getting up and going to grab some food for them both. When he turns to look over his shoulder at her, her hand is tightened around her throat.

“Sierra Madre.” 


	3. Chapter 3

“Where were you?” She sounds livid, but at least she’s lucid. He’s plenty mad at himself for not being there with her too. 

“Here,” he says, not knowing how to tell her everything in his heart and how much it hurt to wake up alone in the desert or how he had screamed his throat raw for her. 

They’re sitting in the middle of the floor and she’s still not eating the brahmin steak he made even though it’s her favorite. It’s been sitting on the plate in front of her for ten minutes. Her fingers twitch and he thinks she might finally pick it up to start eating, but she gets up instead, walking to her pack and grabbing a jar of black goop. 

“What is that?” Boone asks, even though he read the label. 

“Martini,” she says before gulping it down in one of the patented Boone sized sips that she calls chugs. It’s the same jar he opened earlier. He knows how putrid that shit is and she just drank it like it’s nothing. His stomach turns just thinking about it. 

“How do you drink that shit?” 

“You get used to it,” she says quietly before putting the jar back in her bag. 

When she falls silent again, sitting down in front of the steak she refuses to touch, he doesn’t bother asking more. Not yet. He eats in silence for a few minutes before he starts feeling uneasy. He’s used to like quiet. He used to prefer it, but right now all he wants is for her to tell him everything and stop evading questions with the short replies that he usually gives. He decides to turn on the radio. 

Six’s eyes snap open wide as she scrambles backward. Her hands scratch at her throat as she starts to hyperventilate. “Off. Turn it off. Turn it off. Off. Off. Off. Off.” Boone turns the radio off as fast as he can and puts his hands up. Her chest is still heaving, her eyes darting. He watches as her hands discover the vacancy of a collar or necklace or whatever had been there. “My collar?” she asks in between heavy breaths. Boone only shakes his head. 

Six covers her face and starts to sob. 

He can’t ask her what she saw or who the fuck put a collar on her or why she’s suddenly afraid of the radio. Not when she’s like this. 

Okay. No food, no sleep, no radio. 

Boone isn’t great at the whole comforting thing. He has never been good at the comforting thing. When Carla had cried, he would tell her he didn’t know what to do. She eventually told him that she just needed to be held so he would do that as she curled into his chest. Boone awkwardly situates himself next to Six and tentatively wraps an arm around her shoulder. She presses against his chest, her arms wrapping around him as she cries into his shirt. 

“Wait. Boone?” She pushes away from him and wipes at her face. Her eyes are back to that thousand-yard stare like she can’t actually see him. “No. Boone’s not real. Boone’s not here.” She stands up and goes to her pack, searching for the adrenaline. “Where is it?! Wake up! Wake up!” She starts throwing things over her shoulder as she searches and Boone ducks. One of the empty jars shatters against the wall, but she doesn’t seem to notice. 

“You’re awake,” Boone tries. 

“Dog!” she yells. “Domino! Christine!” Six looks over at Boone again, her scared, unfocused eyes filling with the deepest sadness that Boone has seen in a long time. “I fell asleep,” she whimpers, more tears rolling down her face. 

“No,” Boone says again, though he’s afraid to touch her again. His skin is on fire from where she’d pressed against him, but he can’t stand the look on her face right now. “You’re awake.” 

“They’re going to kill me. I’m going to die. Fall asleep and they’ll kill you. Take the adrenaline. I don’t have any adrenaline. Take the adrenaline. Stay awake.” Her hands are shaking. 

Boone grabs the Dinky toy from his pack by the door and brings it to her, holding it out and waiting for her to take it. Six looks up at the toy and reaches for it slowly before pulling it to her chest so quickly he doesn’t have time to let go before it’s ripped from his grip. 

She rocks, muttering to herself a little, her eyes screwed shut tight. When she opens then again, her eyes have cleared and Boone takes a step away from her, still worried that she’s going to flip again. 

“You’re here,” she says, relief flooding her. “I’m out. I’m out. Boone! BOONE!” She abandons the toy and gets up, throwing her arms around him and burying her face in his shoulder. He hesitantly hugs her back before he mirrors her, ducking his face into the curve of her neck and squeezing her tight. “Boone.” She’s crying again, but at least she’s not clawing or screaming. 

Six can’t stay in Novac. She’d paced the room, telling Boone fragments of what had happened in between her asking to leave. He put together that Dog, Domino, and Christine were the people she was with. They had bomb collars on while they worked for someone she refuses to talk about. She doesn’t remember how she got there. She completed what was asked of her and her fellow hostages and then she was mysteriously wandering the Mojave. She can’t or won’t tell him why the radio hurts her or what the black sludge is, but he doesn’t press her. It has to come when she’s ready. 

When she’d gone into the bathroom, she’d started hyperventilating again, pressing herself to the door as she asked Boone to burn the damn thing. He did and they left the room. Left Novac. That was an hour ago. 

Now, she’s on all fours next to a fiend she just mauled. Boone has his arms around her waist as he tries to pull her away from the body, but she’s strong and she’s kicking and clawing and chanting that the head can breathe. Every person, every random kill. It all ends the same with her bashing their brains in as she talks to herself and Boone pulls her off of them. 

He has to get her to Arcade and Freeside is a long walk. He hasn’t mentioned it. He doesn’t know how she’s going to react being so close to casinos again after whatever just happened at the Sierra Madre. Every time he thinks about it, he silently asks her to forgive him. 

The strangest part of traveling with her, aside from the need to pulverize the brains of their enemies, is that she can hear radios before he can. She stops dead, eyes wide, and reaches for her neck. She’d start begging for it to be turned off and start searching frantically for the radio, that haunted look in her eyes that he hates. The first time it happened, Boone hadn’t known what was happening until he heard the faint music in the distance. After that, every time she froze, he lifted his sniper and would shoot any radio he saw, cutting the panic attack short. 

It’s during the current struggle to get her away from the body that she kicks the corpse and the radio on their hip starts crackling. She gasps and lurches away, pulling Boone down with her. 

“Dammit, Six,” he grunts as he sits up, grabbing her gun that she’s been neglecting since she got back. He shoots the radio but she’s already sitting and rocking, her hands around her throat as she stares at the broken radio. 

“I can’t do this,” she says, her voice breaking down into sobs. “Where am I? Why is my collar gone? Where is Dog? Did we do it? Did we succeed? Where am I? Why can’t I tell if you’re a dream or not? I need a martini.” 

“We’re in the Mojave Desert,” Boone says patiently as she grabs a jar from her pack. He spots the dinosaur toy in with her things but he hadn’t even noticed her pack it. “You succeeded so your collar is gone and you’re safe. I don’t know where Dog is. You’re safe here with me.” He sighs as she finishes the drink, her eyes never leaving him as he goes through to answer each question. “I’m real.” 

It breaks his heart that she can’t tell what’s real or not. It stabs into him that every time this happens, she decides if he’s real or not before saying his name like she’s just seeing him for the first time in months. 

“Boone.” There it is. Her face crumples and he reaches out to her. She grips his hand too tight but he doesn’t move or make a sound. “I’m so sorry.” He shakes his head and lets her cry. When she lets go of his hand, he can breathe again and she stands up, wiping the tears away and continuing her walk. 

“Why are we stopping?” Six demands. It’s midnight and he’s just found an abandoned trailer with a mattress for her to sleep on. 

“You need to sleep,” Boone says evenly. “I need to rest.” 

“Rest all you want. No one can sleep.” She looks out over the empty wasteland. “It’s not safe. They’ll kill you. Do you have any adrenaline?” 

“No.” He sighs and leans against the trailer. It’s going to be a long night. 

It takes two days before she finally sleeps again. She fights it the entire time, staggering as she walks, drinking the black martinis like clockwork, and muttering that she can’t sleep. The muttering makes Boone uneasy. He can deal with the crying. He can pull her away from her victims even as she strains to keep beating them, but the muttering? He can’t talk back or rationalize with her. She whispers to herself and all he can do is grind his teeth and hope she snaps out of it. 

“Don’t make me sleep,” she pleads when she falls, Boone catching her before she hits the ground. She sags against his chest, her eyelids drooping. “I can’t sleep. I can’t sleep.” 

“I’ll keep you safe,” he says gently, sitting where he stands and bringing her down with him. Her eyes close even as her eyebrows crease with worry. “You’re safe,” he whispers, watching her face relax as she falls asleep. 

Six has always had a weird sleeping schedule. It’s as if the bullet to her brain took away her sense of how to take care of herself. At least then it wasn’t on purpose. She would sleep randomly regardless of time. He was the most confused when she would only sleep for an hour or two in the middle of the night but then eight hours in the middle of the day or seven hours jut after a fight. 

It’s fifteen hundred and he’s sitting in the middle of the desert with Six sleeping in his lap. He hasn’t slept either because her anxiety over sleep extended to him. Every time he had tried, she would shake him awake and tell him they were going to kill him. 

Part of him is afraid that if he lets himself sleep, he’ll wake up and she’ll be gone, taken right from his arms. There aren’t any animals, insects, or people around for miles. It’s probably safe, but he’s here to keep her safe. 

“Boone!” Six screams, sitting up and panting three hours later. It makes his heart jump, but he stays still. 

“I’m here,” Boone says as she spins, eyes searching. They have that glossed over look and she hugs him to her again, shaking hard. 

“How could you?” She asks, suddenly mad. She shoves him away from her. “We’re not allowed to sleep! They’ll find us and kill us both!” 

“You need to sleep. No one is coming after you and if they try, I have my sniper,” Boone says, standing as she starts walking away from him. She shakes her head and keeps walking. Boone sighs. 


	4. Chapter 4

As Boone had predicted, the peeling signs advertizing the casinos make Six flinch and she started keeping her eyes low to avoid them. They walk into Freeside and for the first time, he’s leading her. Her hand is in his as she lets him pull her along to the Old Mormon Fort. 

“If it isn’t my favorite—” Arcade’s words die in his throat as he sees them. His eyes flicker between Six and Boone. “Courier,” he finishes. 

Boone can’t imagine what he sees. Boone hasn’t slept and probably looks like death. Six is a mess, twitching, muttering, eyes darting everywhere. Her hand is still tight in Boone’s, refusing to let him go. He doesn’t mind even though it’s crumbling him at his core. 

“What can I do for you two?” Arcade asks as if he can’t tell who to get help for first. Boone nods toward Six and Arcade nods subtly. 

“I just need to sit down,” Boone says, walking into the tent. He’s usually on edge around Arcade, but he’s exhausted. Six goes with him to the bed that sits opposite Arcade. 

“Do you have adrenaline?” Six asks Arcade. Boone doesn’t mean to sigh and hang his head. It’s only one of the hundreds of times she’s asked. When Arcade says no, she’ll inevitably dive for her martini even though there’s still another hour before it’s time to drink more. 

“No,” Arcade says. Boone can tell he’s lying, but Six doesn’t call him on it. She lets go of his hand and goes into her pack. 

Boone’s eyelids are too heavy to open again. He can hear Arcade talking, but he can’t focus on the words anymore. Six’s muttering is a chilling lullaby that he hopes never to hear again. He feels himself fall against the mattress and is vaguely aware of Six yelling at him that they’ll kill him if he sleeps but the dark is already pressing in as Arcade pulls her off of him. 

When Boone wakes up, Six is asleep curled against his side on the bed. He feels his heart lodge itself in his throat but he swallows it and looks up. Arcade is still sitting on the other side of the tent, but it looks like he’s busy researching. He has a bottle of whatever black shit Six has been drinking.

“What is this?” Arcade asks without turning. 

“Martini. Don’t smell it,” Boone says quietly. He can’t move. Six has his arm trapped. 

“Too late.” He turns around to face Boone and smirks when he sees him. Boone glares and Arcade puts his hands up. “She needs to see a doctor. I’ve already talked to Julie. She looks awful, Craig. Sleep deprivation, malnutrition… She’s clearly on something. She’s traumatized. What happened out there?” 

“I don’t know,” Boone says, letting his head fall back against the mattress again. “I can handle it.”

“Oh, I can see that, what with you fainting like a southern belle.” Arcade rummages around. “I have to run tests, but this is bad. I can give you fixers for her, but I need to know more.” 

“Like what?” Boone turns to look at him over Six’s shoulder again. 

“Like what happened? What did this to her? Where did she get this stuff? Has she been eating? Sleeping?” 

Boone’s eyes fall to Six’s calm face pressed against his shoulder. He swallows down those feelings he’s not ready to address and sighs. “We followed that radio signal out to a bunker and some gas knocked us out. When I woke up, she was gone. She came back two weeks later like this.” 

“What gas? What was she like?”

“She doesn’t know what’s real. I don’t know what kind of gas.” Boone forces himself to look away from her face and back up to Arcade who looks more concerned than anything. “She won’t sleep unless she passes out first. She was keeping herself awake for those two weeks with adrenaline. She won’t eat anything but the damn martini.” 

“She’s clearly addicted. I’ll find out what it is, but you should get her home.”

“How’d you get her to sleep?” Boone asks, not wanting to use more med-x on her. 

“Med-x and letting her stay with you. We tried bringing her to another tent, but…” He smirks again. “We’re treating one of our doctors for some severe scratches on his face.” 

“I’ll bring her to the ‘38 when she wakes up,” Boone says. Arcade nods. 

“I’ll test this and come find you.” 

“No!” Six screams, digging her heels in as they walk into the Strip. Boone grits his teeth and keeps dragging her along. “No!” She pulls to get free and starts running back toward Freeside. Boone catches her and pulls her against him. 

“You’re safe. You’re home. Look. It’s the ‘38, not anywhere else.” 

She stops struggling and looks between the sign that says  _ Lucky ‘38 _ and Boone’s eyes. He lets go of her again and she walks slowly up the stairs with him. When he opens the door, her eyes fill with fear and he feels her start shaking. Her hand goes to her throat and she stops breathing. 

“I’m here,” Boone says not as softly as he means to. She doesn’t look at him. “Six?” 

“ _ No _ ,” she exhales. 

He looks at the empty casino floor and wonders what she sees. He doesn’t know what happened at the Sierra Madre, but whatever it is has her paralyzed. Her eyes dart for somewhere to hide before she dives behind a counter and peers around it, eyes wide. Boone kneels down next to her and takes her hand, their fingers lacing together before her grip tightens so hard he’s sure his hand will break. He pulls her toward the elevator and she breaks into a run. She pulls him with her into the elevator before she presses herself to the back wall, releasing his hand. 

She sinks down to the floor, shaking violently. “I can’t do this. I can’t do this, Boone. I can’t do this.” 

“You will get through this,” he says, joining her on the floor after pressing the button for her suite. 

“I’m a fucking mess.” 

“Yeah.” 

She looks up at him and cracks a smile at his bluntness. The burst of laughter that bubbles up fills him with hope. He smiles back, and for a moment, they’re safe from the horrors of her mind in the tiny elevator box. 

“I’m sorry,” she sighs when she finishes laughing. 

He shakes his head. He doesn’t need apologies. He just wants Six back. The one who smiles rays of sunshine and laughs a sound sweeter than music. The one who looks over her shoulder and smiles when she sees him. The one who would hide behind a rock while he took out a group of fiends but also stepped between him and four protectrons that had their guns on him. He just needs Six to recover from this and come back to him. 

They walk into her suite and Boone hides the radio in a cupboard while Six wanders around, looking at her things like she doesn’t quite believe she’s home. 

“You need a bath,” Boone says. Six glares at him before laughing again. It feels normal. 

“I need my own clothes,” she says, pulling at the gray shirt. 

Boone nods and goes to the bathroom to run her a bath. Hot water. The perks of being back at the ‘38 wash over him. He can hear her rummaging around, but when he goes to check on her, she’s standing in the kitchen with a blank look on her face. 

“Bath,” he announces. She jumps a little like just waking up and thanks him before she walks past him to the bathroom and shuts the door. Her pack is missing. 

“What did you do while I was…?” Six trails off. She’s wearing a tank top and underwear and sitting on her bed while Boone works on treating the wounds on her neck, a doctors bag open on his lap. It’s not the least amount of clothing he’s seen her wear, but he’s still trying not to stare. 

“I looked for you,” Boone says simply. “Take this,” he says. She doesn’t question him and opens her mouth without checking what he’s trying to give her. He pops fixer in her mouth and watches her swallow it. 

“How’s my armor?” she asks as he closes the bag and scoots away from her. 

“Working on it.” 

“I feel weird,” she says. That’d be the fixer. He doesn’t say anything. “I feel woozy.” 

“Lay down. I’ll bring you water.” He gets up and walks to the kitchen to grab a glass of water for her, hoping she’ll lay down and fall asleep by accident. He takes his time, looking around for her pack a little before actually filling a glass and walking back to the room, the pack remaining hidden from him. 

Six is sprawled on the bed, her mouth open as she snores a little. He sighs with relief, knowing he won’t have to fight her or hear her panicked whispers of murder. He sets the water by the bed and goes back out to the main room to keep looking for her pack. 

He finds it in the oven. 

Arcade knocks on the door a few hours later while Six is still sleeping. He has a jar of the black sludge with him and a worried look on his face. 

“Toxic,” he says without greeting, holding his jar out to Boone.

Boone turns around after taking it and goes to her bag, grabbing the remaining jars and dumping them into the sink. He gags when he opens them and Arcade covers his face with his arm. Neither of them say another word until each jar is emptied and washed out, not a speck of black left in the jars or the sink. 

“Poisonous in large and frequent quantities of it, I would assume. How much has she been drinking?” He sits on the couch as if invited, but for once, Boone doesn’t mind. He sits down with him and runs a hand over his face. 

“One every few hours.”

“It’s going to take more than a couple of fixers,” Arcade sighs, already exhausted from a detox that’s only just started and has far from hit its worst point. Boone nods. “Did you talk to her about seeing a doctor?” 

“No.”

“Craig.”

“Gannon,” he says because he can’t think of anything else to call Arcade. It falls flat, Arcade lifting an eyebrow at the failure before moving on. 

“Do I have to talk to her?” he asks instead.

“No. I’ll talk to her when she wakes up. I can drag her in to see Julie if she refuses.” Boone is exhausted. He glances over his shoulder to the bedroom. She hates when the door is closed, so he can still hear her gentle snores. “If you don’t see us at the Old Mormon Fort tomorrow then come back here.” It’s the kind of invitation Boone would never give in other circumstances. Arcade knows it and just nods instead of drawing attention to it. 

“Did you take up sewing?” Arcade asks. 

“What?” Boone follows his gaze to Six’s repaired armor. He finished an hour ago. “She needed it repaired.” Arcade smirks again in that way that he does that makes Boone want to punch him. 

“I’ll see you two tomorrow,” Arcade says, getting up and making his way to the exit. “Another fixer when she wakes up and it’ll probably leave her less faint. 

“Okay.” He would say thanks, but it would just make them both feel awkward so they leave it at that. He watches Arcade leave before he makes himself comfortable on the couch and closes his eyes. 


	5. Chapter 5

Boone wakes up abruptly to the sound of the kitchen being torn apart. He jumps up and runs in to find Six in the middle of the kitchen twitching. Every door is open, dishes are broken at her feet. 

“What are you looking for?” Boone asks even though he knows the answer. Six is panting, chest heaving. She’s wearing his pants again in favor of any of the clothes in her wardrobe. 

“Where is it, Boone?” she snarls, her eyes narrowed. He had never hoped to be on the receiving end of her anger and now that he is, he can say with certainty that it’s just as heartbreaking and terrifying as he thought it would be. 

“In the living room. I fixed your armor.” 

She runs past him, staggering a little and pushing off from the wall that she runs into. He takes a deep breath before following her in. She grabs her pack from the floor and chokes. He winces and waits. An empty jar flies over her shoulder and crashes into the wall beside him. He flinches. More jars are thrown over her shoulders as she mutters to herself. 

“No. Where are they? No. No!” Each word seems to be punctuated with a crash. “I had ten left!” she yells, still digging. 

“They’re gone,” Boone says. “They were poisoning you, Six.”

“They were none of your business!” she screams, turning around and throwing a jar filled with red dust at him. He ducks and it hits the wall where his head had been. 

Noxious fumes fill the room. Boone falls to his knees, choking and coughing on the powder. Every breath he rakes in is worse than the previous one. He can’t breathe. 

“ _ No! _ ” Six’s scream tears through him and he looks up. She’s not here mentally. She’s back in the Sierra Madre by herself. He remembers what it was like after Bitter Springs. She coughs and gags, dry heaving. There’s nothing in her stomach to throw up. “Christine!” she screams. She coughs and tries to crawl, stopping every few seconds to gag. 

“Six!” Boone chokes, moving toward her. He needs to get them out of here. The dust is settling but it still hurts to breathe and his hands are being cut open from the shattered glass on the floor. 

Six suddenly looks up at him and freezes, color draining from her face. He stops moving immediately and tries to keep himself from coughing by taking shallow breaths. 

“Help! Dog! Help!” Six shrieks, looking around in a panic. 

“It’s just me! It’s Boone!” Boone yells over her. It makes it worse. She finds no help in whatever delusion she’s in and she focuses back on Boone. “Fuck.” 

He scrambles backward as she lunges at him. She pins him to the ground and Boone tries to grab her arms and push her off, but she starts punching. The first one hits his jaw when he turns his face fast enough. His glasses fall to the floor next to him and he looks back up at her. She punches again and again. His eye. His nose. There’s a rush of blood and a burst of pain behind his eyes with the last one, his nose breaking. 

“Stop! Six!” Boone shouts, trying to cover his face. Fuck it hurts. He’s seeing spots and can taste the blood that’s pouring from his nose into his mouth. She’s always been strong, but she’s using all of that strength against him right now. 

Six’s fingers rake down the side of his face and he cries out as the skin tears under her nails. She reaches beside him and he looks up in time to see the jagged piece of glass from one of the jars. 

“Six!” He’s never going to get her back. That laugh in the elevator was the last time he would hear it. That smile, a parting gift. He closes his eyes tight and tries to roll to the side as the shard comes down. He spits blood onto the carpet and coughs before he tries to crawl away from her again. 

“Six!” Her name in his mouth is bittersweet. He wants to help her but he can’t reach her. She’s on top of him again, her fist punching his face into the ground over and over. The edges of his vision are going black and fuzzy. Every time he grabs her arms to try to stop the assault, she wrestles free and slams his head into the floor. She grabs his shoulders and lifts him before slamming him back into the ground, fireworks bursting behind his eyes as his head connects with the floor too hard. His hands fall from her wrists. 

“Fuck! Six, stop! Christ!” Arcade? 

“Ghosts. Ghosts. Ghosts. Kill the head. The heads breathe,” she says as she grabs the glass again. Boone closes his eyes and tries to turn to the side again, but she keeps him pinned and he feels the glass cut into his temple. 

“It’s Boone!” Arcade yells as the pressure from the glass eases. Boone feels Six get dragged off of him but he can’t move. 

“Boone?” Six’s voice trembles. “No!” 

“Craig?” Arcade’s voice is above him, but Boone can’t open his eyes. He can’t move his jaw. It might be broken. He tries to answer but there’s just a strangled gurgle as he feels himself tipping. “Craig!” 

Boone opens one eye and groans. He hears a relieved sigh next to him, but he doesn’t check. He already knows it’s Arcade. They’re in Six’s room and Boone has no idea how long he’s been here. Six isn’t here. That much he can tell. Boone tries to sit up and his head swims. Arcade gently pushes him back down. 

“She’s at the clinic,” Arcade says flatly as he gives Boone more med-x. “And you gave us quite the scare.” 

“Us?” Boone groans. “Since when do you give a fuck?”

“Since she gave a fuck. The concept of friendship must be wild to you. I’ll explain sometime after you’ve recovered from major head trauma.” 

“Shut up.” Boone can still barely move his jaw and one of his eyes is swollen shut. He doesn’t want to know how bad he looks right now.”I should go.”

“You’re not going anywhere yet and Six should be back soon.” 

“The red… dust? Sand?” Boone struggles to get the words out through the dull pain in his skull. 

“Taken care of. It’s all gone and what spilled is cleaned. She’ll be okay.” It’s the nicest Arcade has ever been to him and vice versa. It makes him sick. They have a different relationship. One that Boone would never admit to being near friendship, but it is. 

“Fuck off, Arcade.”

“Get some rest, Craig.” 

Boone wakes up again when he hears Six’s voice. “Oh, Boone…” 

She’s at the door, standing still. He sits up a little, instantly regretting it. He can’t show that though, so he pretends he can’t feel the pounding in the back of his skull as he looks at her. She’s leaning against the doorframe and back in her own clothes. She’s washed free of his blood and her eyes look clear and sad. 

“Come here,” he says, voice raw. Six hesitates and his heart nearly stops, expecting her to turn away. She steps into the room tentatively before racing to the bed. 

“Boone.”

“Six.” He lays his head back down as she crawls carefully onto the bed. She won’t touch him. He watches her reach out and retract her hand before she gets close enough to even brush him with her hand. “It’s okay,” he promises her. 

“I did this to you,” she breathes. “It’s not okay. I— Boone. I didn’t know. I—”

“Did I tell you about Bitter Springs?” Boone asks, cutting off her babbling. She nods. “Did I tell you about  _ after _ Bitter Springs?” She shakes her head. “I had flashbacks too. I didn’t know where I was. When I snapped out of it, I was always shaking or crying or both. I didn’t let you in my room back in Novac for a reason. It’s a fucking warzone in there. You’re not the only one to lash out at me during an episode.” He sighs, the pain starting to get to him. “Do we have any med-x?” he asks, trying not to give away just how much pain he’s in. 

“Yeah.” She scoots off the bed and comes back a second later. She still doesn’t want to touch him, but she gives him the med-x and lets her hand rest over his after a heavy moment of thought. “How did it end?” she whispers. 

Boone opens his eye and looks up at her. “Hm?”

“After Bitter Springs. How did it end?” Her fingers curl around his hand as she squeezes gently. His stomach flips and he’s not sure if it’s from. 

“I still have nightmares,” he confesses and she frowns. “That’s all they are now though. See, this crazy woman came and found me and decided to help me.”

“Was it me?” Six asks. 

He would nod but that would surely send the room spinning so he says, “Yeah, it was you. I didn’t want to keep going.”

“I made you keep going?” 

His thumb runs over her hands gently before he reminds himself that he can’t. He’s her friend, not her husband or boyfriend or lover. “You dragged me back and forth all over the fucking desert. There was too much time to heal and not enough time to keep up with the self-blame and loathing.” 

“Will you drag me back and forth across the desert too?” she asks in a small voice. 

“When I can,” he promises. A small voice in the back of his mind adds, _if you want me to._

“Arcade says I have to go back to the clinic.” She lets go of his hand and curls up next to him, pulling his arm around her like a security blanket. 

“I don’t often agree with the guy…” 

They fall into a comfortable and only slightly strained silence. He wonders if she’s thinking about the Sierra Madre or going back to the clinic. She’d sounded resigned about the clinic like she knew it was the answer no matter how bad she didn’t want to go. Boone starts to drift back to sleep, the med-x easing the pain enough for him to relax. 

“I didn’t want to hurt you,” she whispers when he’s on the edge of sleep. 

“I didn’t want to lose you,” he answers and feels her hug his arm a little tighter before he sleeps. 

Boone wakes up alone. There’s a note from Arcade that he’s taken Six back to the clinic and that there’s more medicine in the drawer next to the bed.  _ Back soon _ , the note promises. 

He forces himself up and goes to the bathroom to look in the mirror. He’s sure he doesn’t want to see it, but he has to. He turns on the light and winces, but makes his way to the sink. One eye is still puffed and purple. His nose is just a little swollen and the bruise is yellowed. His jaw has bursts of colorful bruises on both sides and one of his cheeks has four straight cuts that have scabbed over. They aren’t deep enough to leave a scar. There’s a bandage on the side of his head where he remembers the glass digging in and he doesn’t bother checking it. It’s a good thing he can’t see the back of his head. It would probably look worse than the front. 

He takes a sip of water from the sink before splashing his face and going back to bed. It’ll be awhile before he’s recovered and he’ll do it right here where Six can return to him. 


	6. Chapter 6

Six is feeling a lot better. She’s far from fully healed, but she doesn’t feel the need for Domino’s martini’s anymore and she hasn’t asked about adrenaline in two days. That one is harder to kick because she’s not addicted to taking adrenaline. She’s afraid to sleep and that hasn’t worn off. 

She doesn’t sleep at the ‘38 with Boone. She visits for a few hours in the evening every day and feels the guilt run through her veins. In the beginning, he couldn’t leave the bed for long enough for much of a visit. She would sit next to him and hold his hand or cuddle against his side. A few times he held her while she cried, but he never mentioned it. When he had healed enough, she started arriving to a fresh dinner being set out on the comically large dining table. He always was the best chef. 

Today is different. She still feels her stomach lurch when she sees the casino, but she doesn’t actually hide anymore. She might be getting better. She also left Arcade out of this visit. She hadn’t trusted herself alone with Boone after what she did, but today she’s alone as she heads up to the suite where Boone is no doubt going to be surprised by her early timing. 

Boone. 

When she woke up alone after the gas had knocked them out, Six had screamed herself hoarse for him. She had never heard her voice like that and she didn’t care to ever again. Then again, she never hoped to be separated from him ever again. It pained her to have to visit him instead of wake up with him beside her every morning. 

Six swallows down her thoughts. Boone loves Carla. He had a wife and he still loves her. He will always love her. And Six doesn’t have anything to offer him anyway. She has no memory from before the bullet ripped through her brain. She’s awkward and when they first met she was so anxious about everything that Boone had to save her more often than not. After the Sierra Madre, she’s scarred and haunted by things she can’t talk to him about and is glad he never had to experience with her, but things she desperately wants to talk to him about and is angry she had to go through it alone. 

Yeah, she likes him a little. Or. That’s how it started. She’d got him a dumb dinosaur toy as a way to show it like  _ hey, this is where we met, remember? _ But he didn’t seem like the gift type. He didn’t seem like the type who would care about a plush dinosaur from a lady with a crush on his unavailable ass. So she kept it and hoped that one day she would either get over him or get the guts to just give him the damn thing. That crush kind of tumbled out of control. Now her stomach fills with butterflies when she sees him. When he holds her hand, she has to talk over the sound of her heart pounding. When she dreams of his kisses, she sits up and reminds herself that it was just a dream. 

Boone is who she dreams about always, but it was worse when she started to hallucinate in the Sierra Madre, half-dreaming while she was still awake. Boone with his resting bitch face and rough voice. Boone with his beret and sniper. Boone coming to save her from ghosts and free her from bomb collars. 

“Six?” She steps out of the elevator and waves to him, pushing away the thoughts of him and her dreams. “You’re early.”

“I know you said we can’t go out in the desert again yet, but can we just walk around?” She misses Freeside. She misses her home that she can barely stand stepping foot in. 

“Where’s your shadow?” he asks as he walks into the main hall. His face looks mostly better. The swelling is gone, but most of the bruises remain. His aviators cover his eye, but she can still see the bruise peeking out around it. 

“Arcade is working,” she says. “So? Walk?” 

“Yeah.” He grabs his sniper and slings it over his shoulder before joining her in the elevator. She wants to reach out and take his hand, but that’s for couples or for people who are too scared for walks around Freeside. She crosses her arms instead. 

“Bet you’ve been neglecting Fisto. We could go see your best fuck buddy,” she teases. Boone grimaces before she sees the slight pull up of the corner of his mouth.

“I hate that damn thing,” he says and she laughs. 

It feels good to laugh. It feels like things might have a chance of going back to normal if she can laugh and he can be near her. She’ll never forgive herself for almost killing him, but he seems like he already has. 

“Oh,” Boone says suddenly. They’ve just crossed into Freeside and Six stops walking. “Purified water.”

“What?” She furrows her brows as she looks up at him. She reaches for her pack, wondering if she even has any on her right now. 

“I borrowed some when I woke up,” he says, continuing to walk toward the Wrangler. 

Six grins. “I’ll put it on your tab.” They walk side by side and it feels good. It feels fucking fantastic to finally walk and breathe fresh air and just exist in a world where the air isn’t poisoning her. A world where she can sleep and eat real food. A world where she has Boone by her side. 

She hears the beeping on her collar. It’s loud in her ears and she looks for the radio that’s setting it off. She can’t see one but she has to find it and turn it off or they’ll find her. She looks up at Boone, but Boone only exists in the Mojave. Boone is at home. She’s not at home. She can’t be at home. 

Six steps away from him, away from her delusions of comfort and looks around, grabbing her collar to make it shut up. She needs to turn off the radio, but she can’t see it. 

“Find it. Turn it off. Find it. Turn it off,” she mumbles to herself as she rakes at her neck to try to break free of the collar. Boone is following her. “Turn it off!” She closes her eyes tight and listens to the beeping and the distant noises of an old radio. 

When she opens her eyes again, the oppressive red dust is pressing in around her. She coughs and chokes back a sob. She’ll never get home. She’ll never get back. They’ll kill her before that ever happens. “Gotta find it,” she tells herself to keep herself from crying. 

“Six, look at me.” 

Six closes her eyes tight and feels the tears start, her nose stinging just before they start to fall. 

“Six. Hey. You can do this. You’re here. You’re safe. You’re home,” Boone tells her. He won’t touch her. Either because he’s not real or he’s afraid of her. She sinks to her knees and buries her face in her knees. “Stay here.”

She takes deep breaths and wonders which world she’ll open her eyes to. She hopes it’s the real one and she hopes the real one is home. The beeping is getting faster. She screams and starts scratching at her neck, trying to get the collar off, but she can’t even feel the collar around her neck. 

“They’re going to kill me!” she screams. 

“Pacer, turn it off or I’ll shoot it off!” Boone yells over she cries of terror. 

“Is she really throwing a damn tantrum over the station?” Pacer asks, scoffing. Six opens her eyes and is back in Freeside, but the beeping continues. She can’t breathe. Her heart is taking up too much space, pounding and thrashing about in her chest. 

“I can’t breathe,” she whispers in between quick breaths. When did they speed up? With the beeping probably. She needs to calm down. 

“Pacer, now,” Boone orders. “Breathe, Six.” 

She doubles over and retches in the street. Pacer laughs. 

“She a fiend now? Hooked on somethin’? What a fuckin’ freak. Okay, lady.” 

There’s a shot and Six’s head snaps up, her breath catching in her throat. The beeping stops and she sees Boone replacing his gun over his shoulder. Pacer looks mad. He pushes off the wall he’d been leaning against and walks toward Boone. 

“You just shoot my radio during Heartbreak Hotel?” Pacer asks.

“You’re lucky I didn’t just shoot you,” Boone snarls. 

“Oh, yeah?” His eyes flicker to Six and he laughs again. “Protecting your crazy girlfriend? She’s always been nuts. Heard she got a bullet lodged upstairs. She’ll never b—” 

Boone lunges at him and Six gets up, scrambling to run over to them as Boone slams his fist into Pacer’s face. Pacer is against the wall, pressed between the painted wall and Boone’s white-knuckled fists. Blood trickles from his nose. 

“Boone!” Six yells as Boone punches him again. He lets go of Pacer and steps away from him. 

“Asshole,” Pacer says, dusting himself off and straightening his jacket. 

“I don’t think you need to be bothering the King with any of this,” Six spits. She grabs Boone’s arm before he can throw another punch or reach for his gun and drags him back toward the Wrangler. 

“Yeah, go back to the Wrangler!” Pacer yells. “Get your fix, fucking fiend!” 

Boone grabs his gun and Six wrenches him to face her. “You can’t kill everyone who insults me,” she says. His teeth are clenched tight and she can see his deep scowl. “I can take being called a fiend. Pacer is shit anyway.”

“Yeah.” 

“Let’s go see Hadrian,” she says, pulling Boone back toward the gates that lead back to the Strip. It’s been enough adventure for one day. Bad comedy told by her favorite ghoul while they relax will be enough for today. 

“That’s back at Tops,” Boone says, confused by the change of plans. 

“I’m tired,” she admits. It’s always exhausting to have a meltdown, thinking she’s hearing a collar that she isn’t wearing in a place she’s long since been freed from. “And my neck hurts.”

“I can fix that,” Boone says. 

“After Aces,” Six says. He nods and walks with her, glaring at Pacer until they’re far enough away that Boone would have to walk backward to continue the staredown. 

“I don’t know why you like him,” Boone says as he cleans up her neck from the scratches she’d gauged. “It’s because you’re his number one fan, isn’t it, number one fan?” 

She laughs at his bad impression of Hadrian and rolls her eyes. “I’ve never seen you even crack a smile at any joke. I’m beginning to think you don’t have a sense of humor.”

“I have a sense of humor. I like  _ your _ jokes.” She laughs but Boone’s jaw tightens. She thinks she imagines the tinge of pink in his cheeks. He gets up, closing the doctor's bag and going to return it to the corner of the room. “Should I make dinner or walk you back to the clinic?” 

“Both?” she asks and he nods in agreement before walking out of the bedroom toward the kitchen. She hops off the bed to follow him. She keeps her eyes on Boone to keep from glancing at the bloodstains on the carpet. Just knowing that they’re there makes her feel sick. She’ll have to cover it when she moves back in when she’s better.  _ If  _ she gets better. 

“What?” Boone asks, glancing over his shoulder at her.

“What?” she asks back. 

“You’re staring. What?” 

“Nothing.” 

By the time she has to go back to the clinic, it’s far from where she wants to be. She had felt almost normal just having dinner with him after going to a comedy show and nearly killing Pacer over a few insults. After dinner, she’d sat on the counter while he did dishes and told Boone about adventures they had been on as if they were stories of two epic heroes rather than just the two of them. 

“Do I have to go back?” she asks quietly. They’re stretched out on the bed facing each other now. They’d drifted in here once he’d finished with the dishes. They usually don’t talk, but tonight she wanted to fill the space with stories that make her happy and he had wanted to listen. 

“I’m not your doctor,” Boone says softly. It’s weird hearing him speak in anything other than the rough manner he always does. 

“I can go back in the morning,” she says, looking down so she doesn’t have to wilt under his worried gaze. “If that’s okay.” 

“I’ll deal with Arcade tomorrow then,” Boone says. He sits up and she grabs his arm.

“Where’re you going?” He glances toward the door. “Stay.” 

“I can sleep on the couch,” he says, but he doesn’t move. 

“Stay,” she says again. 

He nods and takes off his glasses and hat before lying back down. Six watches as he gets comfortable before she lies down beside him. His arm wraps around her protectively, making her heart jumpstart. She swallows hard and closes her eyes, pressing into Boone so he can ward off her nightmares and keep her safe even in her sleep. 


	7. Chapter 7

Boone wakes up the happiest he’s been in over a month. Six is still sleeping in his arms. In the night, they’d moved so they fit together like puzzle pieces. Her back is pressed to his chest, their legs tangled together, and her head rests on his stretched out arm. He looks down at her peaceful face and smiles fondly. 

He knows he should have brought her back to the clinic. Arcade and whoever her doctor is over there are going to be mad. But she’s happy. She’d fallen asleep first and there had been no talk of adrenaline or not wanting to sleep. He had listened to her breaths become deep and even as he hugged her to him. His own sleep hadn’t come much later. 

Boone isn’t staring. His heart isn’t pounding. He doesn’t want to run his hand down her arm or brush his lips over her cheek. He definitely doesn’t want to wake her by nuzzling into the curve of her neck or to kiss her gently when she looks up at him. He shuts his eyes tight and rests his head on the pillow again. 

It’s easier to ignore and stifle his feelings for her when they’re not touching. He can live with the dull ache when they travel together, but sleeping curled up together? In the same bed? In her room? With her fitting so perfectly in his arms and looking so at peace? He pulls away from her and gets off the bed, going to the bathroom to splash cold water on his face. 

“Boone?” her panic is evident and immediate. 

“Bathroom,” he calls back and hears her sigh. There’s a soft _thwump_ as she flops back onto the bed. “Eggs for breakfast?” Boone offers as he walks back into the bedroom. 

“Eggs sound great,” she says. She’s starfished on the bed, her legs and arms out straight as she stares up at the ceiling. He tries not to smile and fails, feeling the corners of his lips twitch up. He leaves the room to get started on breakfast. If she doesn’t follow, he’ll just bring it to her in bed. 

He’s not sure what more the clinic can do for her. She seems to be doing fine with the addictions. She hasn’t been twitching or freaking out over the absence of her black poison goop. The only thing left to fix is her mind and there’s nothing the doctors can do about that. Not really. 

Boone keeps breakfast simple. They don’t have a lot here because neither of them have gone to get anything to keep the kitchen stocked since they arrived. He cracks a few eggs into a pan and takes a sip of water while he waits for it to cook. He’ll have to leave today to grab more supplies for this place. They aren’t just running low. He’s cooking the last of it right now. He hadn’t noticed how low things had been getting during his recovery. He vaguely wonders if he’ll have to go alone or if Six will be well enough to go with him. 

Yesterday wasn’t exactly smooth. It had hurt to watch her melt down again. He’d heard her throwing up while he fought with Pacer. Neither of them had mentioned it afterward, but he’s worried and unable to help. He wonders if he was like this. He knows what it felt like, but had he looked like this from the outside? Is that why Manny had been so stubborn in checking in on him despite their fighting? 

“That smells delicious,” Six says, walking into the kitchen with her nose leading her. She plops down in a chair and he hands her a plate of eggs. “You know the way to a woman’s heart,” she says, inhaling the scent before taking a bite. 

“Just yours.” He regrets it the second he says it but she doesn’t seem to notice. Maybe he should take that trip alone. Clear his head. 

“Carla’s too,” she points out and his jaw tightens. Nodding stiffly, Boone joins her at the table. Carla hadn’t been a huge fan of his cooking. She wasn’t from a farm like he was. She had a finer pallet that living in the city had given her. She didn’t like to eat eggs for breakfast and she had said on more than one occasion that she could just get a chef for them. Six seemed to be the only person who found his crappy cooking to be anything other than simple, rural, and unrefined. He loved Carla, but cooking some eggs was far from the way to win her heart. 

“What are we doing today?” Six asks like it’s just like old times and she’s itching for an adventure from anyone willing to pay her. 

“Supply run,” Boone says, nodding toward the fridge. 

“Sounds good,” she says, nodding. She’s coming. Relief fills his lungs and he nods back. She hums happily around a bite of her food before they fall into their usual comfortable silence again. When they finish eating, he takes their plates and goes to clean them. 

“Hey, Boone?” Six says. He puts the dishes back in their cupboard and looks over at her. “Thanks.” 

“Yeah…” 

She gets up and goes to him, hesitating a moment before hugging him. He also hesitates. They don’t really hug. She can probably feel his heart slamming against her chest. He wraps his arms around her and rests his cheek against her head. 

“I’m sorry,” she whispers. 

Then Boone does something that surprises even him and kisses the side of her head. He swallows hard and starts to pull away but she tilts her face up and presses her lips to his. 

His hands on her waist pull her closer as her arms wind up around his shoulders. Her kisses are sweet and hot. Their lips crash together as they pull at each other. She’s gentle even as the intensity builds and he’s too lost on her to think about how the two can happen at the same time. His mind is as scrambled as the eggs he just made. 

“Oh, I can see why no one could find you last night,” Arcade says. Boone and Six jump apart from each other. He looks at the ceiling to avoid either of their gazes. 

“Nothing happened,” Six says. “Why were you looking for me?” 

“Did you forget that you have a team of doctors trying to help you? And don’t think I didn’t hear about what happened with Pacer yesterday. Your boyfriend almost started a war with the Kings.” 

“He’s not my boyfriend,” she snaps. Ouch. Boone’s eyes flicker to her, but she’s busy glaring at Arcade. His eyes dip to the floor. “I don’t need the doctors, Arcade.” 

“Craig, you said you were going to bring her to the clinic.” 

“Don’t talk around me. He’s not part of this. I can do this alone,” Six continues to fight. Boone chews on his lip that had just been in Six’s mouth. He stops and looks over at Six. 

“He’s not part of this?” Arcade scoffs. “You almost killed the man, you call for him when he’s not there, and I just walked in on something I never needed to see.” 

“It doesn’t mean anything,” she flares. 

Right. Boone walks past them both and grabs his sniper from the bedroom. 

“Boone?” 

“Craig?”

Boone walks away. 

It’s easy to shut down his feelings when all he can hear is Six vehemently saying that the kiss meant nothing. He’s not her boyfriend. It doesn’t mean anything. Boone sighs. He’s never thought he was a catch. Hell, he was surprised when Carla said yes to the date he asked her on. He’s average in every way. Nothing special. 

He reminds himself that Six is vulnerable. The kiss meant nothing. He was there. That was it. It’s not like he makes it obvious that his heart has belonged to her for months now. How could she have known that it would hurt him? He doesn’t show when he’s hurt either. He can get shot in the leg and walk it off as long as it won’t worry anyone else. 

He wants to protect her. He wants to hold her when she shakes, feel his hand crushed in hers, wipe her tears when she cries, and kiss her when she hugs him. He wants to share her laughter and fall asleep with her in his arms every night. He can’t do that. Boone reminds himself that they’re friends which is already more than what they were ever supposed to be. They hunted down the Legion together like they’d promised each other when they agreed to wander together. He can be happy with being her friend. 

Boone carries the food back through Freeside, stopping only once to glare at Pacer. That guy is really going to get what’s coming to him one day. He’s the only one of the Kings that anyone has a problem with and he just made Boone’s shit list. 

Walking past securitrons is still uneasy. He hates the damn things. He remembers when Six told him that she had a dream that she started throwing sticks of dynamite at them while Boone shot. Together, they’d taken out the entire security team in between Freeside and the Strip. If only. 

Boone walks through the gate and looks up at the Lucky ‘38. It’s less daunting than the day they’d walked here the first time. The first time, Victor stopped them and told Six that her presence was requested by Mr. House. No one had ever been in or out of the Lucky ‘38 before. He’d stood at the foot of the stairs that flashed with dazzling lights as he watched the door and waited for gunshots or for Six to return. She came back unscathed and kept walking like she hadn’t just been the only person to see the inside of that casino. 

He walks up those dazzling steps now and walks in. He glances around the empty casino as he walks to the elevator. She could be up there alone, arguing with Arcade still, or she could be gone. He doesn’t think about it. He pushes the button and grits his teeth against the memory of her lips on his. 

Boone steps out of the elevator and walks to the kitchen, unloading the food and cans into the fridge and cupboards. Pork ‘n’ Beans for days, enough eggs to last for a while, brahmin steaks, some bug meat. He stashes the whiskey and scotch for a rainy day. 

“Boone?” Six stands in the doorway to the kitchen and leans against the frame. 

“Did you eat?” 

“Yeah. I didn’t know if you were coming back.” 

He checks his pipboy and sees it’s 20:00. Of course she ate. He closes the fridge and turns around to face her. “What happened with Arcade?” 

“He finally agreed that maybe the help I needed was beyond those crackpots.” She shrugs, frowning a little as if replaying their fight in her head. “Can we get out of here tomorrow?” 

“Yeah.” 

They walk out of the kitchen and she heads for the bedroom. He sits on the couch and takes his boots off. She hesitates between the rooms for a moment before she sighs and goes into the bedroom, crawling onto the bed quietly. 

“Goodnight,” he says to the empty doorway. He closes his eyes and wonders if it’s too soon to put a dent in the alcohol stash. 


	8. Chapter 8

The Mojave Desert is hot as fuck. There are some stories from before the wars, before the end of the world, long before Boone or Six were even ideas, that winter nights could cool down. Once in a blue moon, it might even snow. Boone doesn’t care to dwell on stories from the past that taunt him. Global warming, nuclear fallout, and time has changed the world. Winter is just a word in the desert and it doesn’t mean much. 

“Boone?” Six asks, snapping him out of his thoughts. She’s back to holding her pistol instead of rocks or shards of glass. She’s walking ahead of him again too, looking over her shoulder every so often. It’s like how things used to be. Before she was taken away from him. Before they ever kissed. 

“What?” 

“Can I ask you something?” How many conversations have they had that started like this? 

“If you want,” he answers like he always has. “It’s still not really my thing.” 

“Why do you wear sunglasses?” She’s known him how long and she’s just now asking about his aviators? Boone shakes his head in disbelief. “I mean, it makes sense right now. It’s bright out. The sun is high. But… You were wearing them when we met… At night… In the shaded protection of Dinky’s mouth.”

“Right—”

“You also wear them indoors,” she points out, continuing her rambling and ignoring that she should probably wait for an answer if she asks a question. “I’ve only ever seen you take them off to go to sleep and even then, you put them on first thing in the morning. Are you just light sensitive? Is that why you were on night shift?”

“Which question am I suppose—”

“Or is it a Boone thing to keep everyone away? Like they can’t see your eyes so they won’t want to talk to you? Because, buddy, I’ve got bad news for you. I can see your eyes through the sunglasses. Also, they make you look cool, not unapproachable.” 

“We’ve got company,” Boone says, aiming over her shoulder at the fire ant that’s headed their way. They both shoot and the thing dies, but he watches her stop herself from running toward it to pulverize the head. 

“Why do you always wear that beret?” Boone asks, trying to steer her back to the weird conversation and away from visions of what she calls ghosts. 

“My best friend gave me this beret, I’ll have you know,” she says proudly. Boone smirks. “Back to those sunglasses.” She purposefully turns her entire body away from the ant’s corpse as they continue to walk. She stutters, trying to think through the trauma panic. He waits patiently and pretends he doesn’t notice. “Did you only start wearing them when you joined the NCR because you thought everyone else would be doing it so you had to too, but then no one else was doing it but by then it was your thing?”

“Did you want answers, or are you ju—”

“It’s okay if it’s a fashion choice, but I’ll have to make fun of you for it. And if it  _ is _ light sensitivity, when did it start? Have you always worn sunglasses? Have they always been aviators? Are those your only pair? What happens if those break?”

“They won’t break,” he says, the only answer he’s been able to get out. She grins. “I’m not answering the rest of those questions.” 

“You’re no fun.”

“That’s right. Eyes forward, Six.” 

She listens to him and turns back around. He smiles to himself and sighs. They don’t even have a real reason for being out today. She needed to move. He would be happy cleaning her suite, making her food, or arguing with Arcade all day, but he’d rather accompany her on pointless treks. Even if they are through the Mojave on one of the hottest days. 

Their walk has been good and bad. It’s hard watching her flinch when she’s the one to spot a fiend wandering or even just a traveling merchant, walking across the dunes. Her neck is healing and there aren’t any radios out here, but they walk in silence right now because the crackling static alone will make her curl up into a ball and trigger her flashbacks. 

He tries not to think about the last time they had been semi-aimless with a walk. He tries to push down the memories of that stupid broadcast on the radio luring them in with promises that proved untrue. He grits his teeth against the memory of the gas and her scream. 

“It used to rain in the desert,” Boone says to cut off his own thoughts. 

“What?” 

“I don’t know if it’s true.” He sighs. It’s uninteresting pre-war bullshit that he has no idea if it’s true or not. 

“It rained? Here?” She looks around in awe. 

“I mean. It used to rain basically everywhere. And the rain wasn’t toxic.” He shrugs. 

“Boone?” She stops walking and looks at him. His heart might melt so he just nods. “I think I need to go back. I need to see it and see that I’m on this side of things.”

“Is that a good idea?” 

“I think it’s the only idea left.” She shrugs with a grimace. “I can’t keep going like this.”

“Then we’ll go. Just don’t go in.” 

“I won’t go in.” Six takes a deep breath like she finally got something off her chest that she’d been planning on saying for awhile. 

“Promise you won’t go in.” He can’t lose her again and if she ends up back there, after all this, he’d never forgive himself. 

“I promise.” 

They find that old trailer with the single mattress in it that they’d slept in on more than one occasion and make camp. Making camp is easy when it means sitting down and pulling out the food for dinner. The mattress inside is stained but it’s the best they can do without sleeping out in the dirt. There’s some obvious blood, but there are other colors, paler colors that Boone doesn’t want to think about. 

Six takes a bite from the can of Pork ‘n’ Beans and hands it to Boone. “I think I’m doing okay,” she says out of the blue. Boone swallows his bite as he nods. “I didn’t try to bash anyone’s brains in today.”

“Progress.” 

“How’s your head?” They haven’t really been talking about his injuries. In fact, they’ve been avoiding it. When they were still fresh, he had kept the conversation far from him because she could barely stand to look at him. 

“Headaches still.” He shrugs like it doesn’t bother him, but the dull ache in the back of his skull persists. It’s been getting better slowly. When the concussion was worse, he would fall asleep randomly and his head was always pounding. Light or dark, it didn’t matter. Six could whisper or scream and it wouldn’t change the fact that any noise hurt. Now, he can handle staying awake during the day and the headaches are smaller. 

“Do you need to sleep?” she asks, her voice somewhat apologetic. She’s apologized enough and he’s told her as much so she stopped, but he can still hear it. “I can take first watch.” 

“If you promise to sleep after,” he says grudgingly. Normally, he would take the first watch. Especially now with her sleep anxiety and PTSD nightmares. But he hasn’t slept, and his head his pounding. She nods, her mouth too full of food to answer and he sighs. 

Boone gets up and goes into the trailer, staring at the mattress with distaste. He grimaces as he sits down on it, a little bit thankful that it’s not still wet anywhere. He lays down and glances out the doorway at Six as she sits alone, still scooping into the can. At least she’s eating. She’s been eating well enough when he cooks at the ‘38, but he had worried she would slip once they were outside again. 

Boone takes a sip of whiskey to drown out the feeling he gets when he watches her gaze up at the stars. Another sip when he closes his eyes and their kiss replays in his mind. He finishes the bottle when he hears her sing softly to herself and his heart answers with the counterpart’s lines. 

And then, Boone sleeps.   
  
  


Boone had never hoped to return to this particular part of the desert ever again. His skin crawls and his jaw clenches as they walk over the familiar cliffs toward the hole in the ground. Six pauses, her eyes closing as she takes a few slow, deep breaths. Her eyebrows are upturned, memories haunting her. She can do this. 

“Boone,” she whispers in between breaths, eyes still closed. He steps next to her and she grabs his arm to prove to herself that he’s there. He stays still and watches over the wasteland as he counts her breaths. She lets go after ten and starts walking again without meeting his eye. 

When he sees the hatch, he wonders if she crawled out of it, or if she walked back on land. He remembers climbing down into it after her, no feelings of dread. He’d been enveloped in her curiosity. Neither of them had known. If he could go back and tell himself to keep her far from that hatch… If he could go back and break that damn radio signal… 

“I can do this,” Six says. She’s staring at the hatch too. She takes a few breaths and the last one hitches. “I can do this.” Her voice is higher and strained. 

“You’re here,” Boone says evenly. She nods, but she can’t take her eyes off the hatch. Her hand goes to her throat, but her nails don’t dig in. He watches her run the pad of her finger over the scabs on her neck gently before letting her hand fall away again. 

Tears start rolling down her cheeks. “They’re dead,” she whispers. Her shoulders shake and she hugs herself as she pulls in breaths. Boone wraps his arms around her and feels her begin to weep. 

“Breathe,” he reminds her gently. 

“I blew up a casino,” she says in between sobs. Jesus. He doesn’t move. “They took me away from you when you’re all I have and they threatened to kill me unless I did it. They were going to kill me. Everyone was going to kill me.” 

“They didn’t kill you.” He hugs her closer and feels her hands tighten on his shirt. “You came back.” 

“I came back,” she echoes shakily. 

“Oh, fuck.” Boone hadn’t seen the cazador coming. He lets go of Six and steps between them, shoving her back behind him while he grabs his gun. He shoots, but these assholes never go down with one shot. They’re a bitch to kill and it’s close enough to sting him. Boone takes a step backward, but he feels the stinger pierce him, stabbing into his side. 

“Boone!” 

He keeps shooting, but the world is tilting and every other shot misses. He hears the thud of the beast falling into the sand as he does the same. He rolls down the hill, the sand and the sky one in the same. 

“Boone!” Six screams. Not again. Her screams fill his ears as he lands at the bottom of the cliff and the dark claims him. 


	9. Chapter 9

Boone wakes up and sits up immediately, his head spinning. He’s in the hot sand of the Mojave, the closed hatch at his feet, and the last thing he heard before he passed out was Six’s scream. “No!” Boone yells, scrambling up and racing to the hatch. “Six!”

“Boone!” Six’s hands on his arms stop his frantic movements. She’s here. She’s okay. She’s alive. He sits back and looks up at her, his heart attempting to slow as he forces himself to breathe. He’s shaking and clenches his fists to make it less noticeable. “Are you okay?” 

“Yeah,” he says after a moment. “I thought…” He shakes his head and Six furrows her eyebrows. 

“I put a stimpack on your tab,” she says, sitting down in the sand next to him. Her eyes remain on his face and he can’t tell if it’s because she’s worried about him or if it’s so she doesn’t have to look at the hatch that they’re still right next to. 

“You have multiple stimpacks on your tab,” he argues. “It should clear one of your debts, not add to mine.” She smiles a little and shakes her head. “Fine. One stimpack. How long was I out?” 

“Not long. I finished off the two other cazadors and came to get you.” Her smile fades with her words and she sighs. “I think it helped, but I want to leave.” 

“Okay.” He pushes himself to standing and she follows, handing him his sniper. 

The walk to Novac is silent. Boone is overly aware that she just heard him scream for her when she’s never heard him scream for any reason. Six seems to be too focused on her thoughts to say any of them out loud. They both stop and look up when they see the dinosaur. 

“Dinky,” Six says, pointing. 

“Do you want to go?” he asks. She looks at him and nods, but they fall silent again. 

“I—” She stops walking again in the middle of the road that leads up to Novac. Boone stops and looks at her. “Why did you leave the other day?” She pauses for him to answer but he keeps his lips pressed together. “You seemed so mad, I didn’t think you were coming back.” 

“I came back.” Stating the obvious doesn’t seem to help. She makes a face and he sighs. “Why did I leave while you and Arcade argued?”

“Why did you leave after I kissed you?” 

His cheeks flush and he grits his teeth. He is not having this conversation. “Let’s just go.” He turns and keeps walking toward Novac. Her footsteps follow him. He thinks about glancing over his shoulder like she does, but he doesn’t want to talk. Not about this. 

Boone ignores the motel and turns to the dinosaur, walking around the curled tail to the stairs that look like they might tip over any day. It’s late enough that no one is in the gift shop. He heads straight up the stairs toward his old post. 

“You’re back,” Manny says with a yawn. “Did your girlfriend go missing again?” 

“No,” Boone says simply. Six walks through the doorway after him and Manny’s eyes fall to her. 

“Oh. Hey, man,” he says to Six. He doesn’t need to be told to leave. He grabs his gun and raises his eyebrows at Boone before leaving them alone. 

Boone sits down with his back against the door and sets his sniper next to him. Six chews on her lip as she looks out over the desert for a moment before she turns and takes a seat next to him. She’s weirdly close without touching him. 

“Why?” she asks again. 

“Because I was mad.” Boone thinks about her Dinky toy that’s sitting in her pack right now. Unless she left it at the ’38. She doesn’t say anything and Boone rethinks it. He wasn’t just mad. He was hurt and sad. “I know I’m not your boyfriend. I know I’m not yours.” 

“What?” 

Boone rests his head against the door and closes his eyes. “Why did you kiss me?”

“Why did you kiss back?” 

Boone turns and cups her jaw in his hand before pressing his lips to hers. One of her hands comes up to his as she kisses back, her lips parting to deepen the kiss. He breaks it, pressing their foreheads together and focusing on the feeling of her hand tightening on his. 

“Because I love you, Six,” he says, his voice a hoarse whisper. “Because I love you,” he says again with a sigh, pulling away from her. Six looks shocked and it hurts. He shouldn’t have said anything. He shouldn’t have kissed her again. It burns into him, scarring his heart more than it already is. Boone looks away from Six and thinks about leaving, but she’s as much in front of the door as he is. 

“Boone…” 

He holds his breath and waits for her to tell him that she doesn’t see him that way. That she doesn’t want anything to ruin their friendship. That it’s not him, it’s her. All of the stereotypical lines to tell him to shut down his runaway heart. 

“You’re an idiot.” 

That’s a new one. He looks at her and she looks like she’s on the verge of laughing, her bottom lip between her teeth as she grins. 

“I’m an idiot?” he asks.

“Well, I’m an idiot,” she allows, her fingers tracing her as she talks. She lowers her hand and looks over at him. “You left  _ because _ I kissed you?” 

“I left because you yelled that the kiss meant nothing,” Boone corrects her, still not entirely getting the joke. She winces like she forgot she did that and is being scolded even though he hadn’t raised his voice. “I left because you needed food, Arcade was calling me your boyfriend, you two were fighting, and the kiss meant… nothing.” 

“The kiss meant everything,” Six says, smiling that smile that lights up her eyes. She pulls Boone back to her and wraps her arms around him as she steals more kisses, her mouth hot, lips sweet, and teeth, biting. “I love you,” she breathes when his lips move to her jaw as he pulls her onto his lap. “Boone.” 

Someone tries to open the door. It’s probably Manny. Boone has his sniper propped up, keeping the door jammed shut and it’s been that way all night. 

“Fuck off,” Boone calls through the door, slamming his fist into it. 

“Shh,” Six mutters, turning over in his arms and burying her face into his chest. He runs his hand down her back and presses a kiss to the top of her head. 

“We should probably get moving,” Boone murmurs into her hair. 

“You say such vile things sometimes,” Six groans. “Where’re my clothes?” There’s a good chance they aren’t even in the dinosaur’s mouth anymore with how feverishly they’d been tearing each other’s clothes off the night before. Boone sits up and looks around. He grabs her bra and shirt and hands it to her before grabbing his boxers and pants. 

“Your underwear is gone,” Boone says, surveying the area. 

“And your shirt,” she says, pulling her pants on. “You can stay like that.” 

“Six.” 

“Fine. We’ll find your shirt.” She sighs and rolls her eyes, but she can’t keep the smile from her lips. They put on their berets and Boone grabs his glasses before he steals a kiss and grabs his sniper. 

Manny is leaning against the gift shop counter playing with a toy when he looks up. His eyes widen when he sees them but he doesn’t say anything. Which is uncharacteristic of Manny, but Boone doesn’t point it out, walking past him with Six’s hand in his.   
  
  


“Where are we going? The Strip is that way,” Six says, pointing. 

“I know you don’t want to go back, but I know you lied,” Boone says, walking back toward the hatch in the sand. 

“When did I lie?” she asks, running after him. 

“You said I wasn’t out long and you just killed the cazadors.” He shoots her a look and she bites her lip. “You’re not okay, are you?” 

“I’m fine! I have moments! Boone, let's just go!” She grabs his hand and he stops, turning to face her. 

“Do the cazadors still have heads?” Boone asks. She presses her lips together. “Do the cazadors still have heads?” he asks again. 

“No.” 

“Six.” 

“I might have panicked a little when I saw you fall. I was already panicking before then.” She pulls his hand and he walks with her, back toward the road that will lead them back to the Strip eventually. “I knew where I was. I knew you were there. I just… couldn’t stop.” 

“I’m sorry I wasn’t—” 

“I’m fine.” She squeezes his hand and takes a deep breath. “I’m working on being fine. Just like you.” 

“That’s reassuring,” he scoffs. “Just like the alcoholic retired sniper.”

“Hey, at least suicidal isn’t on the list anymore, right?” She smiles a little and he nods. “Come on. Let’s go home.” 

* * *

Open Tabs:

Boone - food, ten bottlecaps, a bullet, his own sunglasses, a bottle of purified water, one stimpack, and about 15 kisses from Six. 

Six - a stimpack or three, ten bottlecaps, some scrap metal, a jug of dirty water, Boone’s sanity. 

Health Reports by Arcade Gannon  
Boone, Craig: Mild concussion, PTSD (in remission), Depression, Sniper up his ass. 

Six: Severe PTSD, Severe anxiety, Insomnia (in remission), Addiction to “Sierra Madre Martini” and Adrenaline (cured), Amnesia from bullet wound (not getting worse, so that’s nice?), too nice for her own good. 


End file.
